Mass Incarceration

These Crime Victims Have Lost Loved Ones To Murder — And To Prison. That’s Why They Want To End Life Without Parole In Pennsylvania

August 28, 2019 Elizabeth Hardison, Penncapital-star.com Organize! Mass Incarceration, Prison, Reform

Kimberly King woke up at 5 a.m. on a February morning in 1997 to her phone ringing. Her mother was on the other end, calling to tell her that her brother, Damani Carter, had been shot in the head in North Philadelphia. King, who was 26 years old at the time, said she entered a state of shock. She threw up. Then she began to pray. “When my mother said he was shot, I just knew he was gone,” King said. “My faith has never been shaken as much as it was shaken at that time.”

A Brief History Of US Concentration Camps

June 25, 2019 By Brett Wilkins, Smirkingchimp.com Educate! Concentration Camps, Detention Centers, History, Immigration, Mass Incarceration, Racism

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has ignited a firestorm of criticism, from both the left and the right as well as the mainstream media, for calling US immigrant detention centers “concentration camps.” To her credit, Ocasio-Cortez has refused to back down, citing academic experts and blasting the Trump administration for forcibly holding undocumented migrants “where they are brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying.” She also cited history.

When America Had An Open Prison – The Story Of Kenyon Scudder And His ‘Prison Without Walls’

June 19, 2019 Emily Nagisa Keehn and Dana Walters, Theconversation.com Create! Mass Incarceration, Prisons, Reform

In a country with mass incarceration, horrific prison conditions and a penal system suffused with racism, some American prison reform activists wistfully look to Scandinavian institutions as beacons of humane prisons. Many Scandinavian countries even have open prisons – minimum security institutions that rely less on force and more on trust. Some don’t even have a locked perimeter, and they emphasize rehabilitation and preparation for a return to society. Back in the U.S., this might seem like an unattainable ideal. But in California, nearly 80 years ago, there was an open prison.

Integrity Forged In Cages

May 31, 2019 Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com Educate! Education, Mass Incarceration

My fellow college graduates: Integrity is not an inherited trait. It is not conferred by privilege or status or wealth. It cannot be bequeathed by elite schools or institutions. It is not a product of birth or race or gender. Integrity is not a pedigree or a brand. Integrity is earned. Integrity is determined not by what we do in life, but what we do with what life gives us. It is what we overcome. Integrity is the ability to affirm our dignity even when the world tells us we are worthless. Integrity is forged in pain and suffering, loss and tragedy. It is forged in the courtrooms where you were sentenced.

“Prison Reform” Is Not Enough. In 2019, Let’s Fight For Decarceration.

January 4, 2019 By Dan Berger, Truthout.org Strategize! Mass Incarceration, Prisons, Reform

Prison reform is now in vogue, but police power remains as brutal as ever. Policing in the US continues to include the power to cage as well as the power to kill — a reality that is spectacularly evident at the southern US border. By all accounts, 2019 promises to be another brutal year in the arena of prisons and policing. President Trump signed the First Step Act in late December, while threatening a government shutdown to secure funding for a border wall. The act makes it easier for some federal prisoners to seek early release, widens federal judicial discretion in some low-level sentencing issues and limits some mandatory minimum sentences in federal cases.

Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee Chapter Starts In Seattle In Wake Of National Prison Strike

November 27, 2018 Seattle IWOC, Itsgoingdown.org Resist! Incarcerated workers, Mass Incarceration, Prison Strike, Prisons, Seattle

This summer we witnessed a prisoner-led struggle for justice on a scale never seen before. Catalyzed by a massacre at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina that took the lives of at least seven prisoners, prisoners in seventeen different states went on strike. Participating in work stoppages, hunger strikes, and boycotts, they made a wide range of demands including the abolition of prison slavery, more access to rehabilitation programs, and an end to racist over sentencing and gang enhancement laws. With the boldness of their tactics, they scared prison officials into offering concessions and attempting to contain the resistance through severe, ongoing repression.

Reimagining Prison Web Report

October 23, 2018 Ruth Delaney, Ram Subramanian, Alison Shames, and Nicholas Turner, Vera.org Create! Mass Incarceration, Prison Strike, Prisons

This document—unlike anything we have ever produced at the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera)—is about the possibility of radical change. It asserts a dramatic reconsideration of the most severe criminal sanction we have: incarceration. It articulates a view that is sure to be alien to many. Yet we need not accept as a given the way we do things now, and we encourage you to envision a different path. Indeed, our vision has concrete reference points. It is in the hope, daring, and promise of a small unit for young adults in a Connecticut maximum-security facility. It is inspired by what we learned studying and visiting prisons in Germany, where the very conditions and operations of that entire system are defined by a commitment to uphold human dignity—a commitment born of that country’s coming to terms with the Holocaust.

Hundreds Gather For The March For Black Women In D.C.

September 30, 2018 Taryn Finley, Huff Post. Resist! Black Lives Matter (BLM), Black Women, Mass Incarceration

Black activist groups marched on the National Mall and Justice Department in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to raise awareness about the injustices black women face. The march’s goal was to “denounce the propagation of state-violence and the widespread incarceration of Black women and girls, rape and all sexualized violence, the murders and brutalization of transwomen and the disappearances of our girls from our streets, our schools and our homes,” according to a statement.

San Francisco Erases $32 Million In Criminal Fees For 21,000 People

August 29, 2018 By Joe McCarthy, Globalcitizen.org Create! Criminal Justice System, Mass Incarceration, New Economy, San Francisco

Everything from finding a job to renting an apartment can be challenging when a criminal record is disclosed. As a result, formerly incarcerated people often struggle to get back on their feet when they leave prison and many end up committing crimes that land them back in a cell. To make matters worse, they’re often hit with thousands of dollars in administrative and other fees for their time spent in court and prison. San Francisco is trying to reduce this financial burden by waiving criminal justice fees for 21,000 people, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The city had previously stopped issuing fees to formerly incarcerated people and this new announcement is an attempt to retroactively address the matter of financial hardship.

Cancellation Of Sacramento ICE Contract Part Of National Campaign

July 8, 2018 By Anta Chabria, Sacramento Bee Resist! Abolish ICE, Immigration, Mass Incarceration

A vote by Sacramento County supervisors this week to end a contract allowing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to rent local jail beds is being celebrated by immigration activists as a major win and a model for national action. "This represents a pinnacle of triumph, and a beacon of hope for the rest of the tactics we are planning to implement," said Pablo Reyes-Morales, a member of Norcal Resist, a network of trained legal observers focused on immigration issues. "We’re definitely going to try to mimic it."

Half Of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails

May 28, 2018 By Brentin Mock, City Lab Educate! Mass Incarceration, Prisons, Racism

17-year-old Lew Blank was fiddling around with the Weldon Cooper Center’s Racial Dot Map when he discovered something disturbing about Wisconsin, where he lives: More than half of the African-American neighborhoods in the state are actually jails. Not only that, but the rest of the black neighborhoods across the state are either apartment complexes, Section 8 housing, or homeless shelters—the lone exception being a working-middle class section of Milwaukee. Sharing this info on the Young, Gifted, and Black Coalition’s blog, Blank explains that he used the Racial Dot Map to identify where predominantly black neighborhoods—defined as “a certain area where the majority of residents are African Americans”—are located throughout the state. There are 56 of them, 31 of which are either jails or prisons. There are 15 cities where the only black neighborhood is a jail.

Jailbreak Of The Imagination: Seeing Prisons For What They Are And Demanding Transformation

May 7, 2018 By Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, Truthout.org Create! Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, Prisons

Our current historical moment demands a radical re-imagining of how we address various harms. The levers of power are currently in the hands of an administration that is openly hostile to the most marginalized in our society (Black people, Native people, the poor, LGBTQ people, immigrant communities and more). While we protect ourselves from their consistent and regular blows, we must also fight for a vision of the world we want to inhabit. For us, that's a world where people like Tiffany Rusher, who began a five-year sentence at Logan Correctional Center in Broadwell Township, Illinois, in 2013, are not tortured to death in the name of "safety." Our vision insists on the abolition of the prison industrial complex as a critical pillar of the creation of a new society.

We Don’t Need Mass Incarceration To Keep People Safe

January 19, 2018 By German Lopez, Vox.com Educate! Crime, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex

If mass incarceration were an effective way to fight crime, then one would expect to see a strong correlation between higher rates of incarceration and reduced crime. States have been running a live experiment of sorts on this over the past several years, reforming their criminal justice systems to, in short, punish people less punitively and incarcerate them for shorter periods of time for low-level offenses. Supporters of mass incarceration, such as the Trump administration and particularly Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have warned that these changes would lead to more crime. But over the past few years, we’ve actually seen the opposite. Take this chart from Adam Gelb at Pew Charitable Trusts, which advocates for criminal justice reform, that shows crime has continued to fall even as states have reduced their prison populations...

4 Reasons For Surprising Change In Racial Incarceration Trendlines

December 28, 2017 By Phillip Smith, AlterNet.org Educate! Mass Incarceration, Prisons, Racism

It's long been a given that racial disparities plague the nation's criminal justice system. That's still true—black people are incarcerated at a rate five times higher than that of white people—but the disparities are decreasing, and there are a number of interesting reasons behind the trend. That's according to a report released this month by the Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. Researchers reviewed annual reports from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting system and found that between 2000 and 2015, the incarceration rate for black men dropped by nearly a quarter (24 percent). During the same period, the white male incarceration rate bumped up slightly, the BJS numbers indicate.

A New School To Prison Pipeline That Might Surprise You

December 6, 2017 Staff, educationalchemy.com Educate! Labor, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, Prison Labor

By Staff of Educational Alchemy - Maryland Correctional Enterprises (MCE) is the state’s own prison labor company. A semi-autonomous subdivision of the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS), MCE commands a workforce of thousands of prisoners, paid just a few dollars per day. MCE workers make far less than minimum wage, earning between $1.50 and $5.10 for an entire day’s work. Most of us are familiar by now with the concept of a school-to-prison pipeline, but here it is, a prison-for-school pipeline, or better yet, prison-for-profit (all hail 21st century slavery alive and well) in the name of “education reform.” It might be a “great day” for Ed St John and U of M, but I doubt its a great day for the forced laborers who did the work. The new center will “transform teaching and learning” but it will not transform systemic oppression or racism. In fact, it benefits from the fruits of oppressive labor. This is not the only time that U of M, or other institutions of higher learning have used prison labor. That is a deep seated problem in itself that warrants our attention. As one news article states, “”Maryland is just a symptom … of how the prison industrial complex affects African-Americans and poor people of color nationwide.”

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